A U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld a patent infringement suit brought by a Canadian software company against Microsoft, and Microsoft now has until Jan. 11 to either issue new versions or stop settling infringing copies of Office 2007, and Word 2007 specifically. The case, which we've previously posted, involves i4i…

Over at the How-To Geek's home away from Lifehacker, blogger Mysticgeek points out a Word 2007 tip many of us had no clue about—you can edit a document in Print Preview mode by turning off the "Magnifier" switch.

Windows/Linux (Firefox): Microsoft, through its open-source hosting site (yes, that really exists), has released a plug-in and extension set for Windows and Linux versions of Firefox that can open Office 2007 files natively. While there are certainly many work-arounds for those encountering the newer,…

If you share a nicely-formatted Word document with one or more folks and ask them to make "just a few edits," you're more than likely to get back a document with inconsistent italics/bolding/underlines, crazy font differences, and whatever size looked best on each person's screen. The Microsoft Word Team explains in a…

The Google Operating System blog points out that both Google web search and Gmail can now read and convert Office 2007 documents, i.e. .DOCX files. That makes for easy mail-yourself conversion if you need it, or bulk-converting files to HTML, just like with PDF files. There are, of course, online tools like Zamzar for…

Windows only: Microsoft recently released a "Filter Pack" that adds in-document searching to the Windows indexing service. That means you can find Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office 2007 documents based on their text contents from the Windows Vista search bar, or Windows Search 4.0 on XP. Adding the filters…

Mysticgeek, a blogger over at The How-To Geek's realm, posts a step-by-step tutorial to creating flow charts with presentation-worthy looks in Microsoft Word 2007. If you've got an eye for design, you can add shadows, 3-D effects, and subtle color shading to your boxes and lines, but if you're just looking for basic…

Once you make the upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007, both the suite and Windows itself assume you'll hardly ever want to make documents in older Office formats ever again. As most modern office workers can attest, though, the .docx 2007 format is not common ground. The How-To Geek shows how to make creating new Office…

Dennis Reilly at CNET's Workers' Edge blog notes that when you've got a whole bunch of text you want people to get through, a two-column layout, with or without titled headers, makes the reading go much smoother than with a page-spanning blog. He posts up plain-English instructions on how to create a dummy template to…

Dennis O'Reilly digs into the full-screen mode in Microsoft Office apps and shows how you can still keep your most-used options and tools close at hand, despite the lack of menus and toolbars. The two basic suggestions are to learn the Alt+letter shortcuts to your oft-used functions, or use Office's custom toolbar…